produced "under the personal direction of Stanwood Mosely." The
piece had been in rehearsal for eleven weeks.

The curtain had been up on the second act for an hour. Scene
designers, scene painters and scene shifters were standing about
with a stage director, whose raucous voice cut the fuggy atmosphere
incessantly in what was intended to represent the exterior of a
hotel at Monte Carlo. It more nearly resembled the materialization
of a dope fiend's dream of an opium factory. What might have been a
bank building in Utopia, an old Spanish galleon in drydock, or the
exterior of a German beer garden according to the cover of Vogue
occupied the center of the scene. The bricks were violet and old
gold, sprayed with tomato juice and marked by the indeterminate
silver tracks of snails. Pillars, modeled on the sugar-stick posts
that advertise barber's shops, ran up and lost themselves among the
flies. A number of wide stairs, all over wine stains, wandered
aimlessly about, coming to a conclusion between gigantic urns filled
with unnatural flowers of all the colors of a diseased rainbow.
Jotted about here and there on the stage were octopus-limbed trees
with magenta leaves growing in flower pots all covered with bilious
blobs. Stan Mosely didn't profess to understand it, but having been
assured by the designer that it was art nouveau, which also he
didn't understand, he was wholly satisfied.

Not so the stage director, whose language in describing the effect
it had upon him would have done credit to a gunman under the
influence of cheap brandy and fright. The rehearsal, which had
commenced at eight o'clock, had been hung up for a time considerable
enough to allow him to give vent to his sentiments. The pause
enabled Mosely, squatting frog-wise in the middle of the orchestra